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Planned Parenthood funding threatened [Why is it tax-funded to being with?]
The Herald Palladium (St. Joseph-Benton Harbor Michigan The Newspaper for Southwest Michigan) ^ | 1-5-2002 | LYNN STEVENS

Posted on 01/07/2002 9:36:18 AM PST by Notwithstanding

The Herald Palladium Archives





January 05, 2002

Planned Parenthood funding threatened

By LYNN STEVENS / H-P Staff Writer

With help from Southwest Michigan legislators, family planning agencies that merely mention abortion options could be pushed to the end of the state funding line.

And poor people seeking birth control could suffer the consequences, say those opposed to the bill passed last month by the state House. Opponents say the bill is a thinly veiled attack on Planned Parenthood, which has offices in Benton Harbor and South Haven.

Berrien County's state representatives Ron Jelinek and Charles LaSata voted for the bill as did Mary Ann Middaugh of Paw Paw.

The Senate will likely take up the bill in February, said state Sen. Harry Gast, R-Lincoln Township.

Gast is skeptical about the bill, calling it little more than a legislative litmus test thrown down by Right to Life of Michigan.

He said he has long tired of the organization's uncompromising ways. "Even in a life-and-death situation, there's no deviation in the Right to Life scorebook," he said.

If Right to Life shows no compromise, then "I'm ready and willing to walk the plank on this one," Gast said.

It could be a lonely walk.

"Every bill that I can remember that was a choice whether or not people would have access to abortion, the Right To Life people have prevailed. In the Senate, I would say it's 2/3 to 1/3 in favor of Right To Life."

Gast said no one is for abortion, "but I would not condemn anyone for it, in very limited circumstances."

If the bill is carried out as written, public health departments may lose federal money - distributed by the state - and Planned Parenthood offices may cut family planning services to poor and moderate-income women, say the bill's opponents. Ironically, public health officials and Planned Parenthood officials say eliminating pregnancy prevention services could increase the number of unwanted pregnancies and abortions in Michigan.

The bill would grant funding priority to agencies and organizations that do not perform abortions, do not make abortion referrals, and do not advocate for continued legal abortion.

Jelinek, (R-Three Oaks) said he understands "all the services that have been available will continue to be available ... organizations that do not perform abortions will have higher priority.

"Now if nobody else is available, funds will still go to that institution," which could be Planned Parenthood.

He said the bill does not affect public health departments because they do not perform abortions.

But according to federal law, health departments would be affected because they and all other providers that get federal Title X funding are required to explain all reproductive health options. At the moment, abortion is a legal procedure in the United States, and therefore, federal law requires it to be included in the list of options.

LaSata (R-St. Joseph) said the bill would not affect state funds going specifically to Planned Parenthood in Southwest Michigan.

LaSata said all state funding for health services is allocated by county, and each county's share is determined by its population. Because there is no alternative health care provider in Berrien County, there would be no change in family planning service levels.

"Charlie LaSata is not correct on that," said Margy Long, spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood-Mid-Michigan Alliance.

"Charlie may be making the assumption that Title X funds are dispersed the same way as other state funds, but in fact, there's nothing in this bill that says that's how it has to happen," said Long, whose alliance includes Cass, Van Buren and Berrien counties. "There's nothing to prevent the money from going to some other place.

"The money all goes into one big pot. It gets dispersed among all the providers in the state. The goal is that services should be geographically widespread. There's nothing in the bill that requires that."

Jelinek and LaSata, endorsed in 2000 by Michigan Right to Life, justified their votes on the basis of a 1988 state referendum banning use of public funds for abortions for women receiving public aid unless necessary to save the life of the mother.

Although state voters stopped tax-funded abortions, legislators should not believe the public opposes legalized abortion or supports the House bill, said Charlotte Wenham, former president of Planned Parenthood.

The longtime St. Joseph resident said every poll in the last decade, including polls paid for by sitting legislators, has shown that people in Southwest Michigan overwhelmingly support abortion rights.

Wenham said Right To Life's ideology is overshadowing health care issues.

"The question is: Are legislators voting in the best interest of health care of all individuals, including those who can't afford it, or in favor of the strongest lobbyists in Lansing? I don't think health care is an area where we can experiment for religious and political reasons."

Mark Bertler, executive director of the Michigan Association for Local Public Health, wrote in August 2001 to the chairman of the House committee considering the bill. He wrote that his board, representing public health departments across the state, opposed it.

"The board is concerned that this legislation may put Michigan's successful family planning and pregnancy prevention programs at risk. Over the past two years Michigan has received $40 million in federal bonuses for reducing teen pregnancy, out-of-wedlock births and reducing the number of abortions in our state. ... As currently written, the bill stigmatizes all providers, including local health departments."

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KEYWORDS: abortionlist
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To: Galatea
What is wrong with 'planning' one's life? Nothing, as long as planned serial killing to alleviate the new lifetime already begun in thew womb from behavior is not touted as a 'reproductive' action. Abortion kills a new individual who's lifetime has already started. Dress up human behavior any way you wish, but to terminate a pregnancy is to kill another individual human life. The key is the lack of individual responsibility for one's actions and the dramatic decline in personal integrity America suffers from.
101 posted on 01/10/2002 4:44:45 PM PST by MHGinTN
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To: hocndoc;Tribune7; GenXFreedomFighter; toenail; Cicero; Wolfie; IM2Phat4U; Surge-on...
A pregnant woman who is murdered can result in the murderer being charged with two deaths?

Is this true???

102 posted on 01/10/2002 4:49:15 PM PST by Sir Francis Dashwood
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To: Sir Francis Dashwood
Here's an article about holding the killer responsible for both lives: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/605621/posts
103 posted on 01/10/2002 8:16:49 PM PST by hocndoc
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To: madg
What is healthy about encouraging young people to use condoms when they don't protect against all pregnancies never mind STD's?
104 posted on 01/10/2002 9:46:51 PM PST by victim soul
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To: Sir Francis Dashwood
It depends on which state you live in.
105 posted on 01/10/2002 9:48:05 PM PST by victim soul
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To: Sir Francis Dashwood; Brads Gramma; JMJ333; hocndoc; Caleb1411; toenail; patent; Proud2bRC...
Is this true??? 102 posted by Sir Francis Dashwood As one would expect in a world gone PC crazy, it is a case-by-case judgement call for the legal system in many states. But give NARAL and the other death cultists a little time to wend their way through a few trumped up cases and it will be a forgotten protection for the endangered little ones.

Serial killing is becoming institutionalized as enlightened social policy for a godless world ... in America of the twenty-first century, don'tcha know!

When all is said and done, the serial killing of tens-of-millions of American preborn individual living beings is the 'nature' (as in humanist) extension of the denial of God and the eternal human soul; if it's not really an eternal being in that woman's womb, and the woman isn't an eternal being, killing the preborn of any species is just 'selection'. [Personally, I believe human's do have an eternal soul, and that soul God begins to knit to the spacetime body from conception onward. Yes, abortion on demand is a very troubling phenomenon, to me, for my nation's ill health, of the collective souls surviving this current holocaust.]

106 posted on 01/10/2002 10:40:46 PM PST by MHGinTN
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To: MHGinTN; Tribune7; GenXFreedomFighter; toenail; Cicero; Wolfie; IM2Phat4U; Surge-on...
Another source of amazement is the concept of those who hold candlelight vigils for heinous murderers about to be executed, a large number of whom think it is acceptable to murder an unborn child without the benefit of a trial. Is the "right to life" of one responsible for much murder and mayhem more important than that of a truly innocent unborn child? Perhaps we should call capital punishment "post-natal abortion" and identify abortion as a "pre-natal death sentence" or "pre-natal summary execution."
107 posted on 01/11/2002 4:16:09 AM PST by Sir Francis Dashwood
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To: Sir Francis Dashwood
Another source of amazement is the concept of those who hold candlelight vigils for heinous murderers about to be executed, a large number of whom think it is acceptable to murder an unborn child without the benefit of a trial.

They are the same people who fall silent when schools teach Islam, yet shriek like banshees when the name 'Jesus' is mentioned; they are the same people who claim Christians are suppressors of freedom while they utilize the most totalitarian of tactics against their opponents; in short, they are those who call evil "good", and the "good" evil.

108 posted on 01/11/2002 4:48:19 AM PST by He Rides A White Horse
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To: Sir Francis Dashwood
Perhaps we should call capital punishment "post-natal abortion" and identify abortion as a "pre-natal death sentence" or "pre-natal summary execution."

Wow! Excellent post!

109 posted on 01/11/2002 5:43:10 AM PST by SpookBrat
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To: MHGinTN
Thanks for the ping, you warrior for life you. =)
110 posted on 01/11/2002 6:19:03 AM PST by JMJ333
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To: toenail, Galatea
It would be more in keeping with the intention of the noblest man in the world if our two Christian churches, instead of annoying Negroes with missions with which they neither desire nor understand, would kindly, but in all seriousness, teach our European humanity that where parents are not healthy it is indeed pleasing to God to take pity on a poor little healthy orphan child and give him father and mother, than themselves to give birth to a sick child who will only bring unhappiness and suffering on himself and the rest of the world.

The folkish state must make up for what everyone else has neglected in this field. It must set race in the center of all life. It must take care to keep it pure. It must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. It must see to it that only the healthy beget children; that there is only one disgrace: despite one's own sickness and deficiencies, to bring children into the world, and one highest honor: to renounce doing so. And conversely it must be considered reprehensible: to withhold healthy children from the nation. Here the state must act as the guardian of a millennial future in the face of which the wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and submit. It must put forth the most modern of medical means to do so. It must declare unfit for propagation all who are in any way visibly sick or have inherited a disease and can therefor pass it on, and put this into actual practice.

------Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

111 posted on 01/11/2002 8:45:23 AM PST by He Rides A White Horse
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To: toenail, Galatea
A Plan for Peace

MARGARET SANGER
(founder of Planned Parenthood)

Summary of address before the New Historical
Society, January 17th, New York City

First, put into action President Wilson's fourteen points, upon which terms Germany and Austria surrendered to the Allies in 1918.

Second, have Congress set up a special department for the study of population problems and appoint a Parliament of Population, the directors representing the various branches of science: this body to direct and control the population through birth rates and immigration, and to direct its distribution over the country according to national needs consistent with taste, fitness and interest of the individuals.

The main object of the Population Congress would be:

a. to raise the level and increase the intelligence of the population.

b. to increase the population slowly by keeping the birth rate at its present level of fifteen per thousand, decreasing the death rate below its present mark of 11 per thousand.

c. to keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feebleminded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924.

d. to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.

e. to insure the country against future burdens of maintenance for numerous offspring as may be born of feebleminded parents, by pensioning all persons with transmissible disease who voluntarily consent to sterilization.

f. to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.

g. to apportion farm lands and homesteads for these segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.

112 posted on 01/11/2002 8:54:31 AM PST by He Rides A White Horse
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To: He Rides A White Horse
Planned Parenthood funding threatened [Why is it tax-funded to being with?]

Indeed. Why?

113 posted on 01/11/2002 8:59:07 AM PST by He Rides A White Horse
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To: Sir Francis Dashwood
f. to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.

"Choice"

114 posted on 01/11/2002 9:01:12 AM PST by He Rides A White Horse
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To: Sir Francis Dashwood
.........teach our European humanity that where parents are not healthy it is indeed pleasing to God to take pity on a poor little healthy orphan child and give him father and mother, than themselves to give birth to a sick child who will only bring unhappiness and suffering on himself and the rest of the world.

How many times have we heard some variation of this theme from the pro-abortionists?

115 posted on 01/11/2002 9:06:38 AM PST by He Rides A White Horse
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To: madg
Like it or not, Planned Parenthood is a public health organization. That’s why they qualify for tax dollars.

(laughing)

116 posted on 01/11/2002 9:14:16 AM PST by He Rides A White Horse
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To: Notwithstanding
LOOKING FOR INFO ON PP--

Does anyone know if a list of donors to this organization is available?

117 posted on 01/11/2002 9:15:43 AM PST by Mamzelle
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To: Mamzelle
http://www.stantoninus.net/listab.htm
118 posted on 01/11/2002 10:37:18 AM PST by Notwithstanding
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Comment #119 Removed by Moderator

To: madg
Well, I've read ahead, and already know that this is just the beginning of your full-tilt, multi-part, marathon, ad hominem assault on me.

Read 111 and 112. You can act as dismissive as you want to, but even the most dim bulb can plainly see that these two people share a frighteningly similar ideology. You can't deny it.

120 posted on 01/11/2002 5:26:48 PM PST by He Rides A White Horse
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